Why I Open-Sourced My eCommerce Apps

Beginning in April 2020, I've built about 3 eCommerce Apps:

• Social King- The Code

• Scraper King & My Amazon History
  My initial goal with these apps was to monetize them as SAAS (Software-as-a-Service) Products. But, there were several factors that led me to open-source them.

a) Dragon Sickness

I started feeling like this:

No alt text provided for this image
This is a Screenshot from Lord of the Rings: the Hobbit Trilogy. The series is about a Dwarf King whose Gold Vault is infiltrated by a Dragon, and whose people is expelled by the Gold-Hungry Dragon.

So long as Thorin, the Dwarf King, is on a quest to reclaim the gold, he remains a moral man. But, the moment the Dragon is vanquished, Thorin gets Gold Sickness - an inability to part "with even one coin" & an unquenchable greed which can drive you to insanity.

2) Open-Source Accelerates Innovation
This week I watched "Revolution OS" - a documentary about the rise of Linux - the OS which led to the Rise of the Internet. There were 3 key Open-Source Projects which led to the internet becoming main-stream.

Linus Torvalds started Linux as an Open-Source project in 1991.
This led to the 1995 Release of the Open-Source Apache Web Server.
And in January 1998, NetScape Open-Sourced the Mozilla Browser

3) Leveling the Playing Field
At a time where retailers are getting hit hard, and eCommerce is accelerating, lots of Mom & Pop Shops and Small-Medium Sized Businesses can use a leg up to grow their businesses.

4) For me, it's More Fun To Teach
I've already made a Udemy Course on How To Build a Full-Stack Chrome Extension with NodeJS and MongoDB.

I'm currently in the process of building a new course on How To Build a Shopify App with NodeJS & MongoDB (*open-sourcing the Shopify App was a prerequisite to making the course).

5) Better Together
Coding is more fun in communities.

If you'd like to implement a Forum / Guest Blogging Platform on your own eCommerce Site, feel free to check out the Repos above. Currently, the Social Network codebase is specifically for Shopify-Powered Sites, but if more people want to get involved in the project, I'd be more than happy to port the features to any eCommerce Site.

Happy 2021🥂